Posts Tagged ‘right-wing extremism’
 
June 19, 2012 0

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo to Speak at White Supremacist Conference

For­mer Con­gress­man Tom Tan­credo (R-CO) is sched­uled to speak at the national con­fer­ence of the white suprema­cist Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens (CofCC), accord­ing to a recent newslet­ter dis­trib­uted by the group. The con­fer­ence is sched­uled to take place July 6–7, 2012, in Nashville, Ten­nessee. Tancredo’s topic will be “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism — the Death of America.”

If this announce­ment is cor­rect, Tan­credo, who is known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and attacks on mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, has shown his true col­ors by agree­ing to appear before a group that pro­motes racism and white sep­a­ratism. The CofCC traces its roots directly to the racist, anti-integrationist White Cit­i­zens’ Coun­cils of the 1950s and 1960s. The group exploits hot-button issues such as immi­gra­tion and black-on-white crime to inflame fears about minori­ties and the destruc­tion of white cul­ture in America. 

Among the sched­uled speak­ers at the CofCC con­fer­ence are Don Black who runs Storm­front, the largest and most pop­u­lar white suprema­cist Inter­net forum; Derek Black, Don Black’s son, who runs a radio show with his father on Storm­front, and James Edwards, whose radio show, The Polit­i­cal Cesspool, reg­u­larly fea­tures racists and anti-Semites. 

In the last few years, Tan­credo has become increas­ingly stri­dent in his view that the influx of both legal and undoc­u­mented immi­grants is destroy­ing Amer­i­can cul­ture. At the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Con­fer­ence (CPAC) in Feb­ru­ary 2011, at a panel titled, “Will Immi­gra­tion Kill the GOP?” Tan­credo alleged that the “cult of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” had hurt the United States and the rest of the world, par­tic­u­larly West­ern Europe. He asserted that mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism was “the dag­ger point into the heart of west­ern civilization.”

The CPAC panel was spon­sored by Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion (YWC), a far-right stu­dent group, which made Tan­credo its hon­orary chair­man. YWC has also decried mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism for “destroy­ing and dis­pos­sess­ing the peo­ple and cul­ture of the West.” The term “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion” has become a euphemism in far-right and racist cir­cles to sig­nify white Euro­pean cul­ture. Dur­ing a Feb­ru­ary 2009 lec­ture at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity that YWC orga­nized, Tan­credo sug­gested that “through­out his­tory, peo­ple who are not white Anglo-Saxon have become Amer­i­can by adopt­ing a white Anglo-Saxon culture.”

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June 13, 2012 0

The Bloody Trail of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas

What’s the most vio­lent extrem­ist group in the United States today? The answer may be sur­pris­ing: it is the Aryan Broth­er­hood of Texas (ABT), one of the largest white suprema­cist prison gangs in the coun­try. Accord­ing to ADL records, since 2000, this racist group—which has no rela­tion­ship to the older, “orig­i­nal” Aryan Brotherhood—has killed more Amer­i­cans than any other domes­tic extrem­ist group.

Since 2000, ABT mem­bers and asso­ciates have com­mit­ted at least 29 mur­ders in the United States, all in Texas or neigh­bor­ing states. The true num­ber is likely con­sid­er­ably higher, as most mur­ders that occur behind prison walls do not get reported by the media. The 29 known killings are all “street” killings, more evi­dence of the grow­ing pres­ence of racist prison gangs on the streets of America.

Why are there so many ABT mur­ders? There are two main rea­sons. The first is that the ABT incul­cates an accep­tance of vio­lence in its mem­bers; vio­lence is as often as not the first—or even only—solution to a per­ceived problem.

The sec­ond relates to the nature of racist prison gangs in gen­eral and the ABT in par­tic­u­lar: the ABT is an orga­nized crime group as well as a white suprema­cist group. The ABT con­sti­tu­tion even acknowl­edges that it can be a “hin­drance” to put ide­o­log­i­cal beliefs before “busi­ness trans­ac­tions” and that the group has to gen­er­ate income to fur­ther its “mis­sion and growth.” The result is that many ABT mur­ders take place in con­nec­tion with their “tra­di­tional” crim­i­nal activ­i­ties, such as metham­phet­a­mine traf­fick­ing, home inva­sions, and iden­tity theft.

Even more ABT mur­ders are actu­ally inter­nal mur­ders, in which gang mem­bers kill their own, usu­ally because they believe or sus­pect the vic­tim has become an infor­mant or bro­ken gang rules, but also some­times due to fac­tional or other inter­nal fights. It is almost as dan­ger­ous to be an ABT mem­ber as it is to encounter one.

Iron­i­cally, only 3 of the 29 known mur­ders linked to this white suprema­cist group in the past 12 years were actu­ally hate-related, though there have been other hate-related crimes by ABT mem­bers, rang­ing from assaults to arsons of African-American churches.

There is no doubt­ing, how­ever, the vicious­ness of the ABT killings, some of which were torture-murders while oth­ers were execution-style killings, in which the victim’s body was burned, decap­i­tated or oth­er­wise dis­mem­bered in order to make iden­ti­fi­ca­tion difficult.

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June 7, 2012 0

Brutal Racist Skinhead Assault in Philadelphia Results in Victim’s Blinding

Racist skin­heads have a long track record of bru­tal and vicious assaults and mur­ders in the United States. Usu­ally, they direct their extreme vio­lence at per­ceived “ene­mies,” such as eth­nic or reli­gious minori­ties, mem­bers of the GLBT com­mu­nity, or anti-racist activists.

How­ever, the racist skin­head sub­cul­ture is an inher­ently vio­lent one. When they have a mind to, racist skin­heads can be just as bru­tal towards their own, as a recent shock­ing attack in north­east Philadel­phia graph­i­cally demonstrated.

Accord­ing to police reports, the attack occurred on May 6, 2012, when a racist skin­head, David Phillips, 43, was assaulted by two fel­low white suprema­cists, Stephen Mas­ten, 29, and Frank Casiano, 28, who allegedly kicked in the door to Phillips’ home and began beat­ing him with sticks and a black­jack while threat­en­ing to kill him.

The police report states that the assailants repeat­edly punched, kicked and stabbed Phillips—but that was not all. Accord­ing to the vic­tim, Mas­ten tried to smother Phillips with a pil­low, then gouged out the victim’s eyes with his bare hands, rip­ping them from their sock­ets. Phillips suf­fered mul­ti­ple stab wounds and lac­er­a­tions on his face and head, as well as bro­ken eye sock­ets, and was per­ma­nently blinded by the assault. He remains hospitalized.

Dur­ing the ini­tial inves­ti­ga­tion, Phillips told police that the per­pe­tra­tors were white suprema­cist com­rades of his, while a fourth white suprema­cist who wit­nessed part of the assault allegedly iden­ti­fied the attack­ers as Mas­ten and Casiano. The wit­ness claimed the vio­lent assault was an act of retal­i­a­tion against Phillips because of a prior inci­dent involv­ing Phillips and Masten’s girl­friend while Mas­ten was incar­cer­ated on theft charges. Mas­ten left prison on parole about two weeks prior to the assault.

A few days after the assault, Joshua Steever, founder of the small racist skin­head crew Aryan Ter­ror Brigade (ATB) and cur­rently liv­ing in New Jer­sey, began post­ing about the attack on the ATB’s on-line forum. Iden­ti­fy­ing Phillips as ATB’s Penn­syl­va­nia state rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Steever asked forum mem­bers to donate money to help with his recovery.

Police arrested the two sus­pects on May 22, 2012, charg­ing them with attempted mur­der, aggra­vated assault, con­spir­acy to com­mit mur­der, bur­glary, crim­i­nal tres­pass­ing, pos­ses­sion of an instru­ment of crime with intent, mak­ing ter­ror­is­tic threats with intent to ter­ror­ize another, sim­ple assault, reck­less endan­ger­ment to another per­son, and crim­i­nal mischief.

Mas­ten and Casiano remain incar­cer­ated with bail set at $3 mil­lion and $1 mil­lion, respec­tively. A pre­lim­i­nary hear­ing is sched­uled for June 12, 2012.

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